Bibi Goes to Washington

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress this week, saying "Israel is not what is wrong about the Middle East.  Israel is what is right about the Middle East."  And toward the end of his address, explaining the need to negotiate land for a demilitarized Palestinian state, he said, "Imagine there is a siren going on now.  And you have less than 60 seconds to find shelter from an incoming rocket.  Could you live that way?  You think anyone could live that way?  Well, we're not going to live that way either."

Netanyahu's voice of experience and reason earned strong bipartisan support.  As Walter Russell Mead wrote in The American Interest, Senate and House support from both parties was unwavering  . . . and a rebuke to President Obama's call for a return to 1967 lines without reciprocal security guarantees and pronouncements on Israel's right to exist:

"The President’s descriptions of the situation are comprehensive and urbane.  He correctly identifies the forces at work.  He develops interesting policy ideas and approaches that address important political and moral elements of the complex problems we face.  He crafts approaches that might, with good will and deft management, bridge the gaps between the sides.  He reads thoughtful speeches full of sensible reflections.

"But the last few weeks have cast him as the least competent manager of America’s Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time.  He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies.  He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street.  He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya not, as he originally told us, for “days, not weeks” but for months not days.

"Where he has failed so dramatically is in the arena he himself has so frequently identified as vital: the search for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.  His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history.  Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed.  This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered."

Is it possible President Obama and the State Department anticipated this and put the whole debate in motion again just to set the next stage for negotiations?

Watch it here.  His address starts at the 22-minute mark.